Quotes About Change

If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.

I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

Good things happen slowly and bad things happen fast. Those were comforting words, and they comfort me today.

Love Love can accommodate all sorts of misshapen objects: a door held open for a city dog who runs into the woods; fences down; some role you didn't ask for, didn't want. Love allows for betrayal and loss and dread. Love is roomy. Love can change its shape, be known by different names. Love is elastic. And the dog comes back.

Happy, for instance, once meant luck. Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.

The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me, I say to Catherine. Yes, Mom. she says, I know, Your memories are my memories now.

I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don't feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to her twins, and really, from the back, it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, but, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now.

The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young

To have a fear you have to be able to imagine the future, and I never think about the future anymore. It is no longer my destination.

I appreciate how hard it is to throw such things away, and harder still to pack them up and move them with you, but other people's condiments are depressing.

What I used to fear was growing old—not the aches and pains part or the what-have-I-done-with-my-life part or the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good.

the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.

My definition of fear is that it's a constant companion, a sidekick, riding you like a watch, going in and out of the days. I don't live like that anymore. The fact that I'm sixty-three has something to do with it. What I used to fear was growing old—not the aches and pains part or the what-have-I-done-with-my-life part or the threat of illness, none of that. I just couldn't imagine what my life would be like without the option of looking good.

When I was young, the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there. Not that youth wasn't great, but it came with disadvantages; I remember the feeling I was missing something really good that was going on somewhere else, somewhere I wasn't. I remember feeling life passing me by. I remember impatience. I don't feel that way now.

We cut down (after much deliberation) two big prickly bushes that were growing together like eyebrows at either side of our small path.

But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

There is something very wrong with a people who consider that the greatest that would ever be has already been, and that the best they can do is to duplicate the past.

Even if you are what your parents made you, if you stay that way, it's your own darn fault. We're not going to undo the past. Let's focus on making the necessary changes to improve your functioning.

Are we truly committed to the notion that ideals and values vary and alter in accordance with changing conditions? Should we not question such a relativistic dogma? Is not the degree of our sensitivity to the validity of the ultimate ideals and values that fluctuates rather than the ultimate ideals and values?

The prophetic word creates, shapes, changes, builds, and destroys (see Jeremiah 1:10).

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, And this too, shall pass away. How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.